Help Wanted

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” at The Wall Street Journal written by the editor, James Taranto.

Help Wanted“Officials Searching for CIA, FBI Badge Counterfeiter”—headline, Stars and Stripes, March 31

Bottom Story of the Day“Barney Frank Is Not Impressed by Bernie Sanders”—headline, Slate, March 30

The GarlandDahlia Lithwick (a commentator for Slate) is seldom right, but we’re beginning to worry that she’s not right. Slate’s legal writer suggests a way around the impasse over filling the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat:

Judge Garland has been nominated by President Obama. Senate Republicans refuse to give him a hearing. After a suitable period of time—let’s say by the end of September of 2016—Judge Garland should simply suit up and take the vacant seat at the court. This would entail walking into the Supreme Court on the first Monday in October, donning an extra black robe, seating himself at the bench, sipping from the mighty silver milkshake cup before him, and looking like he belongs there, in the manner of George Costanza.

If he really wants to follow George’s example, he should rule the opposite on every case. Anyway, Lithwick goes on:

Really, what could the other justices do? They aren’t going to have the marshals tackle him. He is, after all, the chief judge of the second most important court in the land, respected across the ideological spectrum. And in the absence of a Senate hearing on his nomination, one certainly might infer that the Senate has by now consented to his presence there. . . . But more urgently, this is the kind of action—OK, “stunt”—that would draw attention to the fact that just because GOP senators want to pretend that Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is invisible, doesn’t mean that he has to play along. By my playbook, Garland could show up for work in a black robe every day in October, participate in oral arguments with a handful of incisive questions in November, and even start to write a few modest opinions in December, demonstrating how real his nomination is. By January, nobody will even remember that he never got a hearing!

We’ve never met Lithwick, but if you know her, could you check in and make sure she’s all right? [This makes no sense.] …

For more “Best of the Web” from The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto click here.